Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt currently the world leader in per capita housing production, building at almost double China’s rate, and creating a housing surplus that counts in the millions of units.

Despite this, Egypt has been in the grip of a housing crisis for almost eight decades. From the 1940s onward, officials deployed a number of policies to create adequate housing for the country’s growing population. By the 1970s, housing production had outstripped population growth, but today half of Egypt’s one hundred million people cannot afford a decent home.

Egypt’s Housing Crisis takes presidential speeches, parliamentary reports, legislation, and official statistics as the basis with which to investigate the tools that officials have used to ‘solve’ the housing crisis—rent control, social housing, and amnesties for informal self-building—as well as the inescapable reality of these policies’ outcomes. Yahia Shawkat argues that wars, mass displacement, and rural–urban migration played a part in creating the problem early on, but that neoliberal deregulation, crony capitalism and corruption, and neglectful planning have made things steadily worse ever since. In the final analysis he asks, is affordable housing for all really that hard to achieve?

Yahia Shawkat is a housing and urban policy researcher who specializes in legislative analysis,
data visualization, and historical mapping. He is research coordinator for 10 Tooba, a research
studio he cofounded in 2014 that focuses on spatial justice and fair housing. He also edits the
Built Environment Observatory, an open knowledge portal identifying deprivation, scrutinizing
state spending, and advocating equitable urban and housing policies. His work has been
published in Egypte Monde Arabe and Architecture_MPS, and he has contributed to Mada Masr,
Open Democracy, Heinrich Boell, and the Middle East Institute among others.

David Sims is an economist and urban planner who has been based in Egypt since 1974. He is
the author of Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City out of Control (AUC Press, pbk, 2012)
and Egypt’s Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster? (AUC Press, pbk, 2018).

"A great deal has been said and written about Egypt’s perpetual housing ‘crisis’ over the past three decades. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the housing question from the historical, political, economic, and spatial outlooks. Written by one of the most erudite observers in the field, it addresses a critical question that lies at the heart of the social-policy crisis and popular contention."—Asef Bayat, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

"Egypt’s Housing Crisis provides novel insights into the historical evolution of the varied causes and consequences of Egypt’s housing problems, focusing primarily on the vicissitudes of successive postcolonial regimes’ ideologies, discourses, and policies in contexts of unprecedented urbanization and heightened demand for housing. Shawkat combines superb archival research with critical analyses to lift the veil on a multi-layered and apparently opaque housing system, characterized by capricious assertions of power at all levels of society. Ordinary Egyptians’ experiences of informality and insecurity, particularly in times of neoliberalism, are constantly foregrounded to give a human face to an apparently intractable housing crisis."—Noor Nieftagodien, University of the Witwatersrand

“Finally, a tour de force that explains, historicizes, and critiques Egypt’s poorly targeted, ineffective, and unfair housing policies which have excluded those in need from decent housing while producing millions of vacant apartments in rural and urban areas. Shawkat’s seminal contribution convincingly unpacks the complex but traceable legislative, financial, social, economic, and political roots of this untenable housing environment over eight decades.”—Diane Singerman, American University
.

Revolution and Beyond

Beginning in Tunisia, and spreading to as many as seventeen Arab countries, the street protests of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 empowered citizens and banished their fear of speaking out against governments. The Arab Spring belied Arab exceptionalism, widely assumed to be the natural state of stagnation in the Arab world amid global change and progress. The collapse in February 2011 of the regime in the region’s most populous country, Egypt, led to key questions of why, how, and with what consequences did this occur? Inspired by the “contentious politics” school and Social Movement Theory, Arab Spring in Egypt addresses these issues, examining the reasons behind the collapse of Egypt’s authoritarian regime; analyzing the group dynamics in Tahrir Square of various factions: labor, youth, Islamists, and women; describing economic and external issues and comparing Egypt’s transition with that of Indonesia; and reflecting on the challenges of transition. “Its analysis is as fresh as the breathtaking events it covers.”—Nathan Brown, George Washington University “Arab Spring in Egypt is a modern history study that brings much greater understanding to light about the views of modern Arab people and the future they see for their country.”—Midwest Book Review

Cairo Papers Vol. 32, No. 2

This collection of essays revisits agrarian transformation in Arab countries in the light of new realities and emerging challenges. Apart from the urgency of the deepening food crisis, such realities include environmental challenges, changes in consumption and life-style choices, and a new set of rules governing the conditions of access to resources. The issue investigates the commonality and diversity in the current processes of agrarian transformation, based on empirical case studies from different Arab countries.

Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East

Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt’s future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today’s Middle East. The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.

Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity

This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public’s role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies. Contributors: Khaled Adham, Jennifer Bell, Agnès Deboulet, Taline Djerdjerian, W.J. Dorman, Bénédicte Florin, Jörg Gertel, Katarzyna Grabska, Patrick Haenni, Kareem Ibrahim, Samia Mehrez, Sarah Ben Néfissa, Agnieszka Paczynska, Samuli Schielke, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Diane Singerman, Hania Sobhy, Malika Zeghal.